[Chamber Music] is relieved of anachronism or sensationalism by its historical similitude: the narrator's voice is slightly stilted, slightly vapid, of the genteel tradition. Caroline founds an artists' colony in Robert's memory. She and her new lover inhabit the estate; but, unlike its real-life counterparts at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, the Maclaren Community does not survive. Disease once again infests Caroline's destiny, but now she is the only one left to tell.

Artful, distinctive, provocative, compassionate, Chamber Music does not quite manage its tour de force. It is a failure less of nerve than of imagination. Caroline, despite the vitality of her narration, remains only a victim. Would not the publicly indomitable widow of Grumbach's imagined story have impinged, like her real predecessors …, more forcefully upon her surroundings than this pliant, pathetic slave to illusion who "lived an almost empty life into an overcrowded and hectic century"? (p. 134)